Cognateness, frequency, and vocabulary size

An interactive account of bilingual lexical acquisition

Gonzalo Garcia-Castro

Daniela S. Ávila-Varela

Ignacio Castillejo

Núria Sebastian-Galles

Bilingual word acquisition

Word acquisition starts around 6 months of age (Jusczyk and Aslin 1995; Tincoff and Jusczyk 1999; Bergelson and Swingley 2012)

Word-learning involves the (challenging) task of associating a word-form to its referential context (ambiguous, variable)

Bilinguals face the challenge of learning more than one word-form per referent

Bilinguals keep up with their monolinguals: how?

Learning outputs: measuring vocabulary size

Vocabulary checklist: number/proportion of words checked by caregivers as Understands, and/or Says

	Understands	Understands & Says
chair	[ ]	[ ]
table	[ ]	[ ]
…	[ ]	[ ]

Cognate: form-similar translation equivalents (TEs)

Bilinguals acquire TEs from early ages (Bilson et al. 2015; Tsui et al. 2022)

Cognateness facilitates vocabulary growth? Mechanisms?

Parallel activation: candidate mechanism?

Lexical access is language non-selective:

Translation equivalents are co-activated, even in monolingual situations

Cognates are acquired earlier than non-cognates (Mitchell, Tsui, and Byers-Heinlein 2022; Bosch and Ramon-Casas 2014)

Dissociation between models of bilingual word processing (parallel activation) and word acquisition

:::

Simulating word acquisition

Accumulator models

Word acquisition as a continuous process of lexical consolidation (Hidaka 2013; Mollica and Piantadosi 2017)

\[ \begin{aligned} \text{Age of acquisition}_{ij} &= \text{minimize}(|\text{Threshold}_{ij}-\text{Learning instances}_{ij}|) \end{aligned} \]

\[ \begin{aligned} \text{Threshold} &= 250 \\ \lambda &= 50 \end{aligned} \]

Simulating word acquisition

Catalan monolingual (no parallel activation)

Catalan	Spanish
100%	0%

Including learning instances from parallel activation

\[ \begin{aligned} \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= Age_i \cdot Frequency_j + \\ &(Similarity_j \cdot \text{Learning instances}_{ij'}) \end{aligned} \]

Catalan-Spanish bilingual (no parallel activation)

Catalan	Spanish
60%	40%

Catalan-Spanish bilingual (parallel activation)

Catalan	Spanish
75%	25%

Methods

Questionnaire

On-line (formr, Arslan, Walther, and Tata 2020), inspired in MacArthur-Bates CDI (Fenson et al. 1994)
~1,600 items/words (800 Catalan + 800 Spanish)
Participants filled one of four versions of the questionnaire:
500 items: 250 Catalan + 250 Spanish
Short-listed (nouns): 302 translation equivalents (TE)

Participants

138,078 item responses from 366 participants

1 time	2 times	3 times	4 times
312	42	8	4

Modelling

Model structure

Ordinal regression model: \(P(Understands)\), \(P(Says)\)

No < Understands < Understands and Says

Multilevel: Crossed-random effects

Participant and Translation equivalent as grouping variables

Bayesian: probability of parameter values

\[P(\text{model} | \text{data}) \propto P(\text{data} | \text{model}) \times P(\text{model})\]

Predictors

Predictor	Example
Age	Months
Length	Number of phonemes
Exposure	Lexical frequency \(\times\) Language exposure
Cognateness	Levenshtein similarity between a word-form and its translation
Two-way and three-way interactions between age, exposure, and cognateness

Results

Posterior distribution

Predictor	Estimate	95% HDI	p(H0)
Intercepts
Comprehension and Production	0.438	[-0.5, 0.5]	0.088
Comprehension	0.936	[2.44, 0.95]	0.000
Slopes
Age (+1 SD, 4.87, months)	0.405	[1.43, 0.45]	0.000
Exposure (+1 SD, 1.81)	0.233	[0.8, 0.27]	0.000
Cognateness (+1 SD, 25.65%)	0.058	[0.06, 0.1]	0.037
Length (+1 SD, 1.56 phonemes)	-0.062	[-0.35, -0.04]	0.000
Age × Exposure	0.071	[0.16, 0.1]	0.000
Age × Cognateness	0.014	[0, 0.03]	0.985
Exposure × Cognateness	-0.057	[-0.28, -0.05]	0.000
Age × Exposure × Cognateness	-0.018	[-0.11, -0.01]	0.975

Posterior predictions

Discussion

Cognateness facilitates word acquisition

Only low-exposure words benefit from their cognate status: less dominant language receives more facilitation

Parallel activation as mechanism that boosts lexical consolidation: increment in cumulative learning instances

Catalan-Spanish: very specific population

Next steps: word-learning, formalisation

Appendix

Item properties

Levenshtein similarity

Phonological similarity

Levenshtein distance: number of edits for two character strings to become identical

	Orthography	Phonology	String
Catalan	porta	/ˈpɔɾ.tə/	`pɔɾtə`
Spanish	puerta	/ˈpweɾ.ta/	`pweɾta`

Levenshtein similarity

\[ 1-\frac{lev(A, B)}{Max(length(A), length(B))} \]

Catalan	Spanish	Levenshtein
porta (/ˈpɔɾ.tə/)	puerta (/ˈpweɾ.ta/)	0.50 (3)
taula (/ˈtaw.lə/)	mesa (/ˈmesa/)	0.00 (5)
cotxe (/ˈkɔ.t͡ʃə/)	coche (/ˈkot͡ʃe/)	0.40 (3)
…	…	…

References

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Hidaka, Shohei. 2013. “A Computational Model Associating Learning Process, Word Attributes, and Age of Acquisition.” PLOS ONE 8 (11): e76242. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0076242.

Jusczyk, P. W., and R. N. Aslin. 1995. “Infants′ Detection of the Sound Patterns of Words in Fluent Speech.” Cognitive Psychology 29 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1995.1010.

Mitchell, Lori, Rachel K. Y. Tsui, and Krista Byers-Heinlein. 2022. “Cognates Are Advantaged in Early Bilingual Expressive Vocabulary Development.” PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/daktp.

Mollica, Francis, and Steven T. Piantadosi. 2017. “How Data Drive Early Word Learning: A Cross-Linguistic Waiting Time Analysis.” Open Mind 1 (2): 67–77. https://doi.org/10.1162/OPMI_a_00006.

Tincoff, Ruth, and Peter W. Jusczyk. 1999. “Some Beginnings of Word Comprehension in 6-Month-Olds.” Psychological Science 10 (2): 172–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00127.

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